Collaborative Research: Patronage and Political Exchange Networks in a Municipal Legislature: Discretionary Spending on Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

合作研究：市立法机关的赞助和政治交流网络：纽约市非营利组织的可自由支配支出

• 批准号: 1359677
• 负责人: Nicole Marwell
• 金额: $ 14.31万
• 依托单位: CUNY Baruch College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-04-15 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1359677&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Patronage; Political; Exchange

Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines increasingly agree that the governance of contemporary economic and political life operates through complex and shifting webs of organizational relations. This complexity often hides the locus of decision making, raising key problems of accountability for citizens and interest groups of all kinds. Public policy governance systems offer important opportunities to understand these dynamics and their consequences, because public policy by nature attempts to adjudicate among competing interests to produce some form of public good. This project examines legislators' decisions to allocate public funds to private nonprofit organizations that provide social services in a large city. As the proportion of publicly-supported welfare services privately provided has grown, nonprofit organizations increasingly mediate the relationship between local legislators and their constituencies. In turn, nonprofits have become increasingly dependent on government contracts, leaving the amount and quality of public services that citizens experience greatly affected by nonprofits' location and capacity to attract funding. How legislators allocate discretionary public funds to nonprofits reveals two key dynamics of social welfare governance: patronage relationships between legislators, their constituencies, and local nonprofits; and political exchange relationships between legislators. Patronage involves delivering and claiming credit for public resources allocated to a legislator's district. Presumably, the reward for successful patronage is re-election by one's constituents. Political exchange involves deals cut among legislators that lead to the allocation of public resources to a legislator's district, and/or to specific votes on legislation. Focusing on the network structure produced by this governance system and its consequences for specific citizen constituencies, this project asks: (1) What is the structure of patronage relationships between municipal legislators and their district constituencies? And how does it relate to the re-election prospects of municipal legislators, the growth of nonprofit organizations, and citizens' needs? (2) What is the structure of political exchange relationships among municipal legislators? And what are legislators' individual and district characteristics that make them more likely to initiate and reciprocate exchange patterns? (3) How does the structure of political exchange relate to whether consequential legislative proposals are passed?Intellectual Merit: This project contributes to three distinct literatures: (1) By studying sociological processes through a social network approach, it provides a contemporary picture of patronage patterns at the community level, assesses the mutual dependence of legislators and nonprofit organizations, and evaluates the distributive consequences for citizens' welfare. (2) Public administration scholars are concerned with the relative balance of managerial best practices and distributional equity in state administration. This is the first study that examines how patronage fits into a larger system of merit-based public service contracting. (3) This project also advances political science's understanding of distributive politics by disentangling mechanisms of patronage and exchange at the local level.Broader Impacts: In conjunction with prior NSF-funded work, this project will allow comparison of 3 mechanisms of public resource allocation to nonprofit organizations: patronage, political exchange, and competition. Project results will be communicated via a written policy brief and presentations to audiences in government, the nonprofit sector, and the media. The dataset resulted from the project will offer an important resource to scholars, practitioners, and government officials. It also provides a model set of procedures for constructing datasets for other cities or states that have similar discretionary forms of public resource allocation.

来自各个学科的学者越来越认同，当代经济和政治生活的治理是通过复杂和不断变化的组织关系网络来运作的。这种复杂性往往掩盖了决策的轨迹，引发了公民和各种利益集团问责制的关键问题。公共政策治理体系为理解这些动态及其后果提供了重要的机会，因为公共政策本质上试图在相互竞争的利益之间做出裁决，以产生某种形式的公共利益。这个项目考察了立法者将公共资金分配给在大城市提供社会服务的私人非营利组织的决定。随着公共支持的福利服务中私人提供的比例的增加，非营利组织越来越多地调解地方立法者和他们的选区之间的关系。反过来，非营利组织越来越依赖于政府的合同，这使得公民所获得的公共服务的数量和质量受到非营利组织的位置和吸引资金的能力的极大影响。立法者如何将自由裁量的公共资金分配给非营利组织，揭示了社会福利治理的两个关键动态：立法者、他们的选民和当地非营利组织之间的赞助关系；以及立法者之间的政治交流关系。赞助涉及提供和索取分配给议员选区的公共资源。据推测，成功赞助的回报是选民的再次选举。政治交换包括立法者之间达成的协议，这些协议导致公共资源分配到立法者的选区，和/或对立法进行具体投票。本项目聚焦于这种治理体系所产生的网络结构及其对特定公民选区的影响，提出以下问题：(1)市议员与其选区选区之间的惠顾关系结构是什么？它与市政议员的连任前景、非营利组织的发展和公民的需求又有什么关系？(2)市立法委员之间的政治交换关系结构是怎样的？立法者的个人和地区特征是什么，使他们更有可能发起和交换模式？(3)政治交换结构与相应立法提案是否通过有何关系？智力价值：该项目贡献了三个不同的文献：(1)通过社会网络方法研究社会学过程，提供了社区层面赞助模式的当代图景，评估了立法者和非营利组织的相互依赖性，并评估了公民福利的分配后果。(2)公共管理学者关注的是管理最佳实践与国家行政分配公平的相对平衡。这是第一个研究任命权如何适应一个更大的基于绩效的公共服务合同体系的研究。(3)本项目还通过解开地方层面的赞助和交换机制，推进了政治学对分配政治的理解。更广泛的影响：结合之前nsf资助的工作，该项目将允许比较3种公共资源分配给非营利组织的机制：赞助、政治交流和竞争。项目结果将通过书面政策简报和演示文稿的形式传达给政府、非营利部门和媒体的受众。该项目产生的数据集将为学者、从业者和政府官员提供重要的资源。它还提供了一套模型程序，用于为具有类似自由裁量形式的公共资源分配的其他城市或州构建数据集。